For all the chatter about the coming revolution in film distribution, movie fans might be forgiven for thinking that there has been a lot of hot air and not much actual innovation. If you want to see a new release, your choices remain a visit to the cinema or pursuing pirated content. You have to wait four months before you can leegally watch a film in the comfort of your own home. Sure, there is the odd exception such as The Decoy Bride – a little-loved romantic comedy starring David Tennant and Kelly Macdonald, which last month you could find on digital platforms such as FilmFlex, iTunes and Blinkbox, as well as simultaneously in four cinemas – but this is hardly reinventing the film distribution wheel.

While the music industry has seen revenues eroded by illegal downloading, and cinema fans continue to insist they wouldn't engage in piracy if new films were available legally on demand, the various parties have been reluctant to embrace a fresh model until they're certain the old one is definitively broken. Which means that the major expansion of Curzon On Demand, heralded by the release of Aki Kaurismäki's Cannes competitor Le Havre, is a significant development. Opening in 23 independent cinemas nationwide, the critically acclaimed comedy can also be viewed at home on multiple devices for £6, via Curzon's new platform. The Independent Cinema Office's Simon Ward, who advises regional cinemas on programming, says: "This is uncharted territory. Le Havre is the first time a strong arthouse film is going out video-on-demand (VOD) in tandem with a theatrical release. Previously none of the films that have been simultaneously VOD have worked at the box-office, either because they were weak titles that wouldn't have had a theatrical audience anyway, or because they were weakened by the presence of VOD. Le Havre will be an interesting one to watch."

Curzon chose to launch its new service – and reveal the 14 UK distributors that have signed up to it, as well as a new Curzon On Demand application for Samsung smart TVs – with a press event at its Mayfair cinema earlier this week. It was at this venue, that The September Issue achieved a remarkable triumph. Despite coming out on DVD just 10 days after its mid-September 2009 theatrical bow, the Vogue documentary happily played for five weeks at the Curzon Mayfair, grossing a quarter of its £428,000 UK total. The result proved that availability of a film for home consumption is not necessarily a bar to simultaneous success in cinemas – as long as it's one that audiences genuinely want to see.

It's no surprise that the brand that is driving this long-overdue innovation is Curzon. The company owns not just some of the key UK independent cinemas but also major arthouse distribution company Artificial Eye, so it can credibly claim to have a rounded view of all the issues and challenges. In CEO Phillip Knatchbull, whose background is in both film and internet businesses, it has an evangelist who has long been anticipating the tipping point "where we live in a windowless world with regard to how a film is released, where the consumer has to be in control". And with his distributor hat on, he can see one definite upside to VOD. While cinemas take the lion's share of revenues from ticket sales, and the distributor is left with considerably less after VAT is deducted, VOD, with its significantly lower running costs, sees the proportions flip: it is the content provider that takes a bigger slice of the pie, not the retail platform.

Cinemas take a different view. "They're ambivalent at this point," says Ward of his clients, which include the Watershed Bristol and Showroom Sheffield. "They are certainly not endorsing it as a wonderful thing. The attitude is: let's wait and see. It's a thin end of a wedge that's coming over the next few years. Is it something that's just going to replace DVD? In which case that's fine. Or is it going to take away from a theatrical audience? In which case it's going to hit cinemas."

There may be ambivalence, but the independent and arthouse cinemas are choosing to roll with the punches, rather than fight a change that everyone sees as inevitable. So far, Odeon, Vue, Cineworld and Showcase are not budging on the four-month theatrical window, which will create an interesting shift if on-demand services take off: distributors will increasingly be willing to sacrifice multiplex bookings on even their bigger arthouse movie releases for the gain of simultaneous VOD revenue, and the four major circuits will become even more dominated by mainstream fare.

If that happens, don't expect any tears from Knatchbull. "From market research we know that our audience doesn't really like going to multiplexes to see these kind of films. And with the cost of releasing going up, and the amount of film rental that as a film distributor we receive, it doesn't really make much financial sense to continue with the old model."

Of course, there is nothing stopping the multiplexes compromising the theatrical window for, say, films released on fewer than 50 screens – no one is expecting them to allow simultaneous VOD for The Dark Knight Rises. But while they mull that conundrum, there's a danger that their programming may gradually become less diverse.

As for the arthouse cinemas that Ward advises, he remains sanguine about their likely fate. "If we are to cast our vision into the future, and assume every film does this, which is the ultimate end game of this initiative, then the question is: how do people want to experience this content? We think for an independent arthouse cinema, the communal experience, the immersive experience, people who really care about cinema, that's all still going to exist. We've seen the coming of television, the coming of VHS, all these things that were going to spell the death-knell of cinema, and we just don't believe that video on demand is going to do that either. We think cinema has something special to offer."

• Join theguardian.com/film/series/curzon-on-demand for a live stream of Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre on Friday 6 April at 6:40pm BST. We'll be watching the film, then following a post-screening discussion, live from the Curzon Soho in London